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The battle over has been going on for 17 months. William Ackman made his original public accusation that the company was a pyramid scheme and would collapse before Barack Obama’s second term, before Edward Snowden and before Pope Francis. Since the Herbalife battle began, Warren Buffett and Jorge Paulo Lemann announced their $27 billion purchase of H.J. Heinz, closed the deal, and owned the ketchup maker for just about a year.

As the Herbalife saga heads into month 18, there is no sign the battle is receding. But what started with shock and awe has turned into a low-intensity test of endurance. At first there were fireworks—Ackman predicting that Herbalife’s stock was going to 0, billionaire investor Carl Icahn calling Ackman a crybaby, billionaire hedge fund manager Dan Loeb mocking Ackman, and Herbalife CEO Michael Johnson suggesting the U.S. would be better without Ackman around. Now, Ackman, whose Pershing Square hedge fund is still shorting Herbalife in a big way, and Icahn, who is Herbalife’s biggest shareholder, are publicly forgiving each other and engaging in détente. Bill Stiritz, the CEO of Post Holdings who personally owns more than 7% of Herbalife, is taking the long view when talking about a potential leveraged buyout of Herbalife. “You can take a bite and eliminate a sucker all at one time or you can have an all-day sucker where you shrink the shares slowly over time,” he recently told Bloomberg News.

The fight over Herbalife, which sells diet shakes, has become a war of attrition. Last week hedge fund billionaire George Soros, whose family office played a role in the most heated Herbalife moments last year, showed that he was not exiting the battle. Soros Fund Management, run by Scott Bessent, disclosed in a Securities & Exchange Commission filing that it had bought 1.7 million Herbalife shares in the first quarter to own 5% of the company. Soros had trimmed his stake in the company at the end of last year. Another prominent money manager, Richard Perry, also disclosed that his hedge fund had added Herbalife shares in the first quarter, amassing a 4.8% stake by purchasing another 1.8 million shares.

Ackman, however, has been relentless in promoting his short thesis against Herbalife. When it looked like the Herbalife war had become a one-sided affair with the company’s stock soaring above $80, Ackman continued his efforts, conducting a conference call about Herbalife’s practices in China, lobbying in Washington, releasing a documentary about distributors who claim to have been victims, and saying he would go “to the end of the Earth” to defeat the company. Ackman got a big break in March with news that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating Herbalife, sending the company’s stock below $50.

Herbalife helped push the stock back above $60 by releasing new financials that were well received by investors and buying back a tremendous amount of its own stock. Ackman’s good first half of 2014 (aided by Pershing Square’s big wins on trades like Allergan and Fannie Mae) means that he has the staying power to remain in the trenches against Herbalife. The company will continue to have to execute on the business front while facing enormous pressures and operating in a high-stress situation.

For Ackman, this type of drawn out battle brings new challenges. He has been successful in sparking investigations by federal regulators and some prosecutors on both the federal and state level. But those kinds of investigations generally take time. Last year, in order to avert a potential short squeeze that could crush him, Ackman covered 40% of Pershing Square’s short position in Herbalife, a strategic retreat that saw him tell his investors that he had instead purchased put options and other derivatives that were “long term” in nature. Are those options in the money and when do those options expire? Ackman hasn’t publicly answered those questions, but in February, he said that Pershing Square would make more if Herbalife collapsed today than if its shares had tanked when Ackman first launched his $1 billion short campaign.

Still, some have pointed to the large amount of trading that took place in Herbalife put contracts in January. Maxwell Meyers, the CNBC producer who orchestrated the famous television slugfest between Ackman and Icahn last year, wrote that many options traders figured Ackman was the buyer of the put contracts that expire in January 2015 and that they would be in the money with Herbalife’s stock between $65 and $50. That would give Ackman about eight months. It would also explain why Herbalife put together a plan to repurchase so much of its own stock over the course of the year, even suspending its dividend to do it. It seems like the Herbalife war will still be raging for some time.